Thursday, May 18, 2017

Zachary First, Managing Director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University, opines at PayScale.com on just how misguided is the question: “Can we, in economic terms, justify investing in a degree in the humanities?”Read the rest here.

Thursday, May 11, 2017

And the award for most contrived, unrealistic, and preachy television drama goes to...

I’ve always thought that the best way to ruin a book’s audience is to make a movie out of it. Once the movie is made (and if it is successful), no one wants to read the book anymore. I'm thinking Lord of the Rings here, The African Queen, Gone with the Wind, Forrest Gump.

But ruining the book may be the one and only good thing about “The Handmaid's Tale,” Hulu’s dramatization of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel. It might at least save us the trouble of reading about a young woman who is a concubine in a male-dominated future society brought about through some unexplained and improbable coup ...

Tuesday, March 28, 2017

“Women will never know who they are until they let men be men. Let’s get rid of Infirmary Feminism, with its bedlam of bellyachers, anorexics, bulimics, depressives, rape victims and incest survivors. Feminism has become a catchall vegetable drawer where bunches of clingy sob sisters can store their moldy neuroses.”

Wednesday, March 22, 2017

LEXINGTON, KY—A new Kentucky law outlining free speech and religious freedom protections for students is being attacked by several national and state groups who claim that it would allow discrimination. The group that pushed for the law for the last two years is defending it.

"We wonder where they were when this bill was being debated in the legislature," said Martin Cothran, a spokesman for The Family Foundation, which lobbied for the bill's passage. "If they had legitimate reasons for opposing the bill, they could have come and told us why they thought religious freedom and free speech threatened their political agenda, but they didn't."

"If these groups are opposed to free speech and religious freedom, they're argument isn't with this bill, they're argument is with the Constitution."

Cothran said the bill, Senate Bill 17, simply underscored existing free speech and religious freedoms by outlining the ways in which students could engage in political and religious discourse in schools. "We live in a state in which a school censored a performance of A Charlie Brown Christmas and at least one person has been jailed for asserting her Constitutional right of free religious exercise."

"The groups now opposing the bill have an ugly history of promoting anti-religious discrimination that responsible policymakers need to distance themselves from."

Saturday, March 11, 2017

For most of history, it’s been a widely-held belief that human beings are worthy of special treatment. This belief provides the foundation for the idea of morality, and is the underlying principle behind human rights.

As British philosopher Roger Scruton pointed out earlier this week in the New York Times, "Almost all people believe that it is a crime to kill an innocent human, but not to kill an innocent tapeworm."

Sometimes, Scruton explains, this belief is based on religion: "If, as many people believe, there is a God, and that God made us in His own image, then of course we are distinct from nature, just as He is" ...

Monday, February 27, 2017

Movement conservatives are finding out that the enemy of their enemy is not necessarily their friend. In fact, the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) seems to be finding out that they are themselves their own worst enemy.

After just having invited Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at its annual conference, it was revealed that right-wing gay provacateur had publicly defended sex between adolescents and older men.

Within twenty-four hours of CPAC inviting him, he was dis-invited. Now the only pearls you'll see worn at CPAC will be worn by women ...

Wednesday, January 11, 2017

The Lexington Herald-Leader ran the story yesterday. I am quoted in the latter part of the story:

Attorney General Andy Beshear said Tuesday he will defend only one of two new laws that limit abortion in Kentucky.

In a statement, Beshear said his office would defend House Bill 2, which requires doctors to perform an ultrasound and present the results to their patient before providing an abortion, but will not defend any legal challenge to Senate Bill 5, which bans abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

Tuesday, January 10, 2017

But, says Henig, some people with XY chromosomes (who we used to think were males) did not have fully developed male genitals. And some people with XX chromosomes (who we used to think were females) did not have fully developed female genitals (or even had developed male genitals).

Rather than conclude that in such cases the person is a male whose male chromosomes were not allowed to do what male chromosomes do in males, or a female whose female chromosomes were not allowed to do what female chromosomes do in females (the obvious inference), Henig simply concludes that chromosomes don’t dictate whether someone is male or female.

Thursday, January 05, 2017

On the day that the New and Improved Kentucky General Assembly passed two prolife bills, Planned Parenthood held a rally in the Capitol Rotunda to warn against the dangers of saving unborn babies.

But at least no one was offering fetal body parts for sale. We'll give them that.

Planned Parenthood's defenders in the House, of course, voted against the bills. The opponents charged Republican leadership with "railroading" the bill through (at "breakneck speed," said the ACLU). That's right. A bill (or something very similar to it) which has been introduced repeatedly and which has even had several legislative hearings (but no votes, other than in the Senate) over the course of several years just hasn't received enough scrutiny.

And, anyway, it's a pretty simple bill.

House Democrats, of course, don't like railroads when it comes to passing prolife legislation. They prefer cemetaries.

The Republicans "played ... political games" in passing the legislation, said Jeff Greer, (D-Brandenburg).

Now let us pause for a moment to consider the fact that no one has ever played political games in Frankfort before. Particularly Democrats. And Jeff Greer has never done it himself.

Democrats have never buried bills in committee. Democrats have never threatened members with punishment for either voting for bills they didn't like or for not voting for bills they did like. They've never replaced members of the committee the night before the committee was to take up a bill. They've never used parliamentary rules to make it impossible to make amendments to a bill. They've never held a bill in the Rules Committee indefinitely.

Ever.

And no Democrats were seen on the floor yesterday assailing parliamentary moves that they themselves not only defended just last year, but used themselves.

Did House Republicans use parliamentary procedures to further their legislation? Of course they did. Lawmakers do it all the time. That's what parliamentary procedures are for. Legislatures pass rules so that members can use them. That's what House Republicans did when they recessed to hold a judiciary committee meeting and rolled changes to House Bill 2 (the "ultrasound" bill) into a committee substitute to prevent Democrats from offering amendments, many of which were "poison pills" to make the bill unconstitutional and therefore subject to rejection by the courts.

And did any of the people now criticizing House Republican leadership for "playing political games" to pass the bill stop to consider that the games the Republicans were playing were designed to prevent Democrats from playing political games to kill the bill?

If they did, they kept it to themselves.

The people now criticizing House Republicans for "playing political games" with a prolife bill need to ask themselves whether having their motions to suspend the rules voted on in open roll call votes isn't a little better than having the Democratic speaker ignore Republican calls for roll call votes and instead take voice votes and rule that their side won when clearly the votes were in the other direction.